Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Electricians are fun guys. Their favourite topic of conversation? Gory Stories of people dying from being accidentally electrocuted!

That the worst place to electrocute yourself is the palm of the hands, because it causes the muscles to contract so that you can't let go.

Apparently this usually involves touching 2 metals, 1 'earthed' and one electrified or 'live'. This causes the electricity to arc though your body.

One guy was drilling into a thick metal pole, they where building a fence. Guy put his hand on it to steady, other hand holding the drill. Little did he know that his drill had a fault and had become live. So he goes to use it, hand gets stuck to drill, hand gets stuck to pole.

Electrical Tagging and Testing was apparently introduced in Victoria after a 19 year old university student was killed, he worked at McDonalds and had the job of setting up the friers etc. for the morning crew.
Cleaners would come in, pull all the equipment out and clean behind them.. most of which was made of steel for hygiene, one of the cords came adrift, just one wire. Guy spilt some eggs, went to clean up.. Zzap. workers came in to find him dead on the floor.

I checked this story out and it's True! McSpotlight mentions that it happened in 1996, so there you go > http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/intworker_30nov96.html

Third case was of a girl who lived in a building with metal frames around the doors like how Schools/Offices have them set up? With a aluminum strip to separate tile and carpet. Nobody knew that during the construction of the building the Electrician had been lazy, when the decision was made to have a electric rather then a gas stove he simply put the wire across the floor a few cms down in the concrete and covered it up. He never took the time to shield it properly.

So along comes the carpenter and nails the frame into the floor.. the nails being stuck into the wire. You can see where this is going right? So the girl comes home, placing her hand on the fridge she touches the doornob and gets stuck to it, the entire door fame being live, which connected to the lock and door handle.. yep. Instant Death.

This whole discussion came about because of a lightbulb that was painted yellow. Turns out the bulb was a 30 watt, it's designed to run on lower voltage so they paint them in order to stop mistakes with people putting them in a normal socket - which would cause them to explode (dramatically speaking)

You see being a training centre it's bound for the kids to stuff up on occasion, so in order to stop them killing themselves the entire building runs on about half of the normal voltage, the kids never know it but quite a few are only alive today because of it.